1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a portable storage medium as a medium capable of storing data and being carried freely, and in particular, to a portable storage medium connectable to a personal computer's general-purpose port to which either a printer or a storage medium can be connected.
2. Related Art
Personal computers equipped with a connection unit (to which a portable storage medium such as a USB memory can be attached) configured as a general-purpose port (to which either a printer or a storage medium can be connected) have been proposed in recent years. There has also been proposed a printer having a similar connection unit (to which a USB memory can be attached) and being capable of automatically reading out print data from a USB memory and printing out the print data upon connection of the USB memory to the connection unit (the so-called “direct printing”). An example of such a configuration is described in Japanese Patent Provisional Publication No. 2005-138531.
For the direct printing from a portable storage medium (e.g. USB memory), at least data (e.g. file) to be used for the printing has to be stored in the portable storage medium prior to the connection to the printer. However, there are cases where not a file created by an application but print data generated by a printer driver (for the printer) has to be written to the portable storage medium prior to the connection. For such cases, there has been proposed a printer driver which realizes the writing of print data to a USB memory by displaying a dialog including a check box “OUTPUT AS FILE” on the computer screen, checking the status of the check box, and outputting the print data to the USB memory when the printing process is executed with the check box in the checked state. However, there are cases where the print data (e.g. PDL (Page Description Language) data) stored in the USB memory as above can not be displayed by a personal computer, etc. (to which the USB memory is attached) for the check of the print image.
On the other hand, in cases where the printer driver installed in a personal computer does not have the function of writing print data to a USB memory, display data (e.g. JPEG data) is written to the USB memory by the personal computer by the ordinary file storing process. In this case, a printer to which the USB memory is attached might be incapable of printing out the display data (e.g. JPEG data) directly (with no data conversion) depending on the specifications of the printer.
The present invention which has been made in consideration of the above problems is advantageous in that a portable storage medium, capable of realizing data sharing between a personal computer and a printer with ease, can be provided.
In accordance with an aspect of the present invention, there is provided a portable storage medium which is provided with a connection unit which is connectable to an external device and enables data communication between the portable storage medium and the external device connected to the connection unit, a data storage unit which stores data received from the external device via the connection unit and a data conversion unit capable of applying data conversion from print data into display data to the data stored in the data storage unit.
According the another aspect, there is provided a portable storage medium which is provided with a connection unit which is connectable to an external device and enables data communication between the portable storage medium and the external device connected to the connection unit, a data storage unit which stores data received from the external device via the connection unit and a data conversion unit capable of applying data conversion from display data into print data to the data stored in the data storage unit.
According to a further aspect of the invention, there is provided a portable storage medium which is provided with a connection unit which is connectable to external device and enables data communication between the portable storage medium and the external device connected to the connection unit, a data storage unit which stores data received from the external device via the connection unit, and a data conversion unit capable of applying data conversion from display data into print data and data conversion from print data into display data to the data stored in the data storage unit.